Sunday 15 September 2013

Richard Dawkins: By the Book

The author of “The God Delusion” and “An Appetite for Wonder” doesn’t care for “Pride and Prejudice”: “I can’t get excited about who is going to marry whom, and how rich they are.”
The interview with Richard Dawkins, by the New York Times Sunday Book Review here....
I particularly liked the following bit, as he mentions two others of my favourite public intellectuals, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens...
SBR: You have written several books on science and secularism. What other books on the subject would you recommend?
Dawkins: Look at the list of those who obsessively attack Sam Harris and you’ll get an idea of what a dangerously effective writer he is: clear, eloquent, penetratingly intelligent, suffers no fools. Much the same could be said of Christopher Hitchens, and the attacks on him have increased now he is no longer around to fight back. Less well known, but very good in their different ways, are J. Anderson Thomson’s “Why We Believe in God(s),” a psychologically informed analysis of what J. L. Mackie called “The Miracle of Theism,” and Sean Faircloth’s “Attack of the Theocrats!,” a chillingly well-researched unmasking of the contemporary political threat to America’s noble secular tradition.